Univ of Chicago Press Free Monthly eBook

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For February, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain by Simon Goldhill.


The Victorians: conventional, patriarchal, family-focused, and strait-laced? Then there were the Bensons: Edward White Benson, archbishop of Canterbury; his wife, the lesbian writer Mary Sidgwick Benson, to whom he proposed marriage when she was only twelve; and their children, all of whom became prominent writers and none of whom married, including Fred Benson, gay and a competitive figure skater, who authored the Mapp and Lucia series of comic novels.
Drawing on the voluminous writings of the Bensons—collectively they wrote tens of thousands of letters and hundreds of books—Simon Goldhill created the compulsively readable A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain, our free e-book for February. Via the Benson family, Goldhill shows us a world transitioning to modernity.

Check it out here.

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For March, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago by Gillian O’Brien.


“Chicago’s reputation for dramatic crime and corruption predates Al Capone and Prohibition—by decades. In May 1889 Dr. P. H. Cronin, an esteemed physician, was found in a sewer. He was naked, dead, and savagely beaten. The investigation and trial caused an international sensation, and one of the world’s first media circuses, over a story that involved Irish revolutionaries and reactionaries, secret societies, and even a French spy.… All at a time when Chicago had been burned down, and was reborn as the fast-growing city in America.”—Scott Simon, NPR’s Weekend Edition

Check it out here.

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For May, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today by Ilana Gershon.

“In this beautifully written volume, Ilana Gershon explores the subtle violence that ensues when, in order to get a job, you have to apply branding and marketing techniques to your own personality, and reconfigure your very sense of being in the world as a result.”—David Graeber

Check it out here.

[Froide]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For April, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today by Ilana Gershon.

“In this beautifully written volume, Ilana Gershon explores the subtle violence that ensues when, in order to get a job, you have to apply branding and marketing techniques to your own personality, and reconfigure your very sense of being in the world as a result.”—David Graeber

Check it out here.

Thank you for the reminder. One small correction:
Pictures from an Institution was the April 2020 selection; Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today is the May 2020 selection.

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For June, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence—Laurence Ralph.

“Chicago has a long history of police violence. The starkest evidence is seen in the hundreds of recent cases of torture of suspects in custody—overwhelmingly African-American men. Our latest free e-book, available until noon on June 6, is The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph. The book is based on ten years of interviews and archival research and takes the form of open letters to victims, witnesses, participants, activists, mayors, and police. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph traces institutional racism through law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us and lending a voice to those deceased.”

Check it out here.

Sadly, a very appropriate book for this month.

[keithdt]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For June, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence—Laurence Ralph.

“Chicago has a long history of police violence. The starkest evidence is seen in the hundreds of recent cases of torture of suspects in custody—overwhelmingly African-American men. Our latest free e-book, available until noon on June 6, is The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph. The book is based on ten years of interviews and archival research and takes the form of open letters to victims, witnesses, participants, activists, mayors, and police. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph traces institutional racism through law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us and lending a voice to those deceased.”

Check it out here.

Sadly, a very appropriate book for this month.

NOTE: Says only free until June 6.

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For August, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is Uselessness by Eduardo Lalo. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

We follow our narrator through his romantic and intellectual awakenings in Paris, where he elevates his adopted home over the moribund one he has left behind. But as he falls in and out of love he comes to realize that as a Puerto Rican, he will always be apart. Ending the greatest romance of his life—that with the city of Paris itself—he returns to San Juan and his lifelong task to discover the use (or uselessness) of literature and writing.

“In this dreamy and succinct novel, Lalo takes readers on an intimate journey of companionship abroad.… Set between glowing, literary Paris, the deceptively dangerous Spanish coast, and various humble San Juan apartments, Uselessness is a novel of modern plight that’s brimming with hope and wisdom.”—Booklist

Check it out here.

[Dr. Drib]

^ Just picked it up.

Thank you!

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For October, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? by Gerald N. Rosenberg

Where is the Supreme Court headed? The public waits in hope or in dread. But, how much does the Court really matter? Our free e-book for October is a controversial classic, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? by Gerald N. Rosenberg, a study of the social impact of court decisions. Rosenberg examines famous cases over desegregation, abortion, and same-sex marriage and argues that the impacts of the legal decisions is limited. American courts are ineffective and relatively weak, and real social reform instead has come through legislation and direct citizen action, not through the courts.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, this is a book that may infuriate or inspire you. Or both.

Check it out here.

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For November, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is Who Freed the Slaves: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards.

In the popular imagination, slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation may have been limited—freeing only slaves within Confederate states who were able to make their way to Union lines—but it is nonetheless generally seen as the key moment, with Lincoln’s leadership setting into motion a train of inevitable events that culminated in the passage of an outright ban: the Thirteenth Amendment.

The real story, however, is much more complicated—and dramatic—than that. With Who Freed the Slaves?, distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards tells the little-known story of the battle over the Thirteenth Amendment, and of James Ashley, the unsung Ohio congressman who proposed the amendment and steered it to passage. Taking readers to the floor of Congress and the back rooms where deals were made, Richards brings to life the messy process of legislation—a process made all the more complicated by the bloody war and the deep-rooted fear of black emancipation. We watch as Ashley proposes, fine-tunes, and pushes the amendment even as Lincoln drags his feet, only coming aboard and providing crucial support at the last minute. Even as emancipation became the law of the land, Richards shows, its opponents were already regrouping, beginning what would become a decades-long—and largely successful—fight to limit the amendment’s impact.

For what my personal opinion is worth, I've read about 35% into the book and am enjoying it.

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For December, 2020, the University of Chicago free ebook is Lost Mars: Stories from the Golden Age of the Red Planet edited by Mike Ashley.

Our actual travel options are sadly limited this winter. So why not dream big? Embark on wild Martian adventures with our free e-book for December, Lost Mars: Stories from the Golden Age of the Red Planet, edited by Mike Ashley. Featuring stories by masters of science and speculative fiction like H. G. Wells, J. G. Ballard, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and, of course, Ray Bradbury, this collection is the perfect companion for whiling away a winter's night.
Rockets are boarding now. Read Lost Mars free in December.

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For 48 hours only, the University of Chicago has made They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 by Milton Mayer.

A rather interesting read and, sadly, some of the themes are being seen in today's headlines.


They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.

“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”

That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For 48 hours only, the University of Chicago has made They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 by Milton Mayer.

A rather interesting read and, sadly, some of the themes are being seen in today's headlines.


They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.

“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”

That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.

Thanks. I've downloaded this and will give it a go.

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For February, 2021, the University of Chicago free ebook is Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture by Bruce Lenthall.

Radio had an enormous impact on the lives of Depression-era Americans. In Radio's America Bruce Lenthall charts the formative years of our modern mass media. Telling a story with echo's of today's Internet-driven extermism Lenthall documents how many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the early twentieth century, and explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives.

Just read the first few chapters and so far, an interesting read.

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For March, 2021, the University of Chicago free ebook is The Safe House by Christophe Boltanski.

In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts are that family, and they have secrets.

When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat.

That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan—introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother—a woman of “savage appetites”—and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself

I'm about 4 chapters into the book. So far, so good.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this ebook is a PDF format.